I Wish I Lived in Jim DeMint's World

Last week, the Democrats tried to have a vote on a sense of the Senate resolution expressing no confidence in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and advising his removal from that post. It was put forward as an amendment to a defense appropriations bill, and Senator Ted Stevens ultimately sidestepped it with a parliamentary maneuver so Repub senators didn't have to go on record one way or another just a couple of months before the elections. However, there was some debate on the issue before they were able to set it aside, and Jim DeMint, senator from South Carolina, gave us this little pearl of wisdom:

But since 9/11, this President took action. And with the support of this Congress, he along with his staff has changed Afghanistan. Afghanistan is no longer the staging area for terrorism. And a signal has been sent to any country that does it.

Afghanistan is now a democracy. Women can vote and go to school. Iraq no longer has control of their arsenal of chemical weapons. Iraq is moving toward a democracy, admittedly with many difficulties.

But if our Democratic colleagues had their way, Iraq would become the new staging area for terrorists.

That statement is so unbelievable in so many ways that it's difficult to pull out each of the inaccuracies. The world that DeMint lives in seems quite different from ours, but it sure seems like a wonderful place. Afghanistan is a fully functioning democracy. Iraqi chemical weapons were found and dismantled. There are no terrorists in Iraq. I'll bet the sun never stops shining and there's free ice cream for all.

By the way, in his column last week (which I discussed here), Frank Rich talked about the photo of Rumsfeld affably shaking hands with Saddam Hussein back in the '80s. It turns out that the documents, photos and video surrounding that visit have become the most-downloaded file from George Washington University's National Security Archive. (Download it yourself, if you want to.) According to The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire, the Rumsfeld/Saddam material has surpassed the previous most-downloaded file, which featured the historic meeting of Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley in the Oval Office.